Vicarious Living: Power of Snob Appeal

In Julian Fellowes's urbanely funny novel "Snobs," an accountant's daughter named Edith buys a ticket to visit the ancestral home of Charles, the Earl Broughton. This is an inauspicious way for them to meet, but Charles winds up proposing marriage.

"Flower shows all summer, freezing pipes all winter" says Charles's sister, describing what Edith's new life will be like. "Does she hunt?" No, she doesn't yet -- not unless Charles counts as prey.

Edith's parents chose her name "for the fragrant overtones of a slower, better England and perhaps, half-consciously, to suggest that it was a family name handed down from some Edwardian beauty. It was not." But Edith fulfills those ambitions on the morning after the wedding, when a hotel waiter calls her "my lady" while delivering breakfast in bed.

"Oh well," Edith thinks.

No one ever went broke overestimating snob appeal. It's one of the most marketable vicarious pleasures. And it colors writing well beyond Cinderella fiction. Biographers are often drawn to elite subjects. Chick-lit heroines are perennially obsessed with status. The coming-of-age memoir gets more attention if its narrator learned about life at a socially prestigious school. And a diet book has more cachet if it cautions against too many tartes aux pommes rather than too many Twinkies.

"Toto, I don't think we're in Hershey, Pennsylvania anymore," Mireille Giuliano writes in "French Women Don't Get Fat," using the superiority of French chocolate to weave a trans-Atlantic snob factor into weight-loss guidelines. Ms. Giuliano also notes that corn on the cob, while an American favorite, "is usually reserved for livestock" in France. She recommends Champagne as the just-right complement to pizza. She also works as a director of Champagne Veuve Clicquot.

Never mind the implicitly snobbish corollary to her book's title. (If French women don't get fat, who does?) Ms. Giuliano turns out to be eminently level headed. She combines reasonable thoughts about nutrition with a general endorsement of joie de vivre, and her tone is girl friendly enough to account for the book's runaway popularity.

Ross Gregory Douthat's memoir "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" isn't as lofty as it sounds, either -- even if the author fails to win membership in Harvard's most rarefied club and pretends he isn't disappointed. The closest Mr. Douthat comes to social demarcation is in the realm of politics. He claims to have heard "You're not a bad guy for a Republican" at Harvard on a regular basis.

Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep" presents another occasion for campus condescension, since it unfolds at a top-tier boarding school near Boston. There are rich students, like the C.E.O.'s daughter who winds up with a very large dorm room. There are also students like the book's heroine, Lee, who doesn't understand why that room is so big. "Come on," one classmate explains.

"Prep" is less satirical about campus snobbery than the jauntier "I Am Charlotte Simmons" -- in which Tom Wolfe, having devoted his entire career to sniffing out signs of privilege, rises to such tasks as cataloging what a spoiled rich girl and a noble poor one would respectively bring to their shared dorm room. And "Prep" is serious enough to have spawned its own upper-crust souvenir: versions of the pink-and-green ribbon belt on the book's cover are turning up at Ms. Sittenfeld's readings. But little of this book's appeal lies in the type of familiar snob dynamics that make Lee ashamed of her parents' Datsun. What makes "Prep" work is the solidly adult, myopia-free voice behind its high-school status games.

School days can forge a lifetime's worth of class distinctions. Consider the evidence in "The Perfect Hour," James L.W. West III's recapitulation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love affair. This haunting book captures the voice of wealthy, beautiful Ginevra King, who was 16 when Fitzgerald, two years older, swooned over her. Yes, it was romantic -- but monogrammed place cards and society-page clippings were among his souvenirs of Ginevra's world.

Its echoes would last a lifetime and appear repeatedly in his fiction (most seductively in "The Great Gatsby"). And thanks to the entree that Ginevra provided, Fitzgerald would become the patron saint of status-conscious American fiction as he went on to immortalize "the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, the freshness of many clothes, of cool rooms and gleaming things, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."

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Snobbery comes in many forms; it need not revolve solely around obvious forms of privilege. So Koren Zailckas, in "Smashed," her memoir of boozy college years, shows how status can be linked to the ability to out-drink everyone else in one's sorority. And in Jennifer Haigh's novel "Baker Towers," the story's loving but impoverished coal miner's family (replete with details like tin foil on the antenna of the old television set) is far superior to one son's new bride, a department store heiress from Philadelphia's Main Line. It is noted that her sole culinary skill involves opening wine bottles, and she can't even cook an egg.

But in its purest current form, snobbery revolves around two things: schadenfreude and cold cash. So there are books that virtually attach price tags to their characters' perks and possessions. Karen Quinn's "The Ivy Chronicles" manages to fuse two snob-related genres -- I-got-fired and Upper-East-Side-rat-race -- with a woman named Ivy who loses her high-powered job. First she is reduced to riding in a bad-smelling Lincoln Town Car redolent of middle management. Soon she has no driver at all. Ivy must give up her life-energy coach ($18,000), analyst ($24,000), nannies and maid ($74,000) "and a slew of other expenses like food, insurance, electricity, telephone, cable, doctor bills" and turn a $399 outlay into $9.99 by coloring her own hair. Ivy gets even by starting a service that helps parents worm their children's way into prestigious kindergarten classes. And Ms. Quinn's sendup is amusing, except for those times when she tries to summon a voice of hauteur. "How are you, Ivy?" asks one awkwardly caricatured blueblood. "You look raaather well and blond hair becomes you, doesn't it?" Clearly anyone hoping to convey true snob appeal had better learn how to talk the talk.

James Patterson doesn't need accents; he has brand names instead. In his latest novel (and one of his friskiest), "Honeymoon," a gold-digger named Nora becomes engaged to wealthy men and then kills them, for no better reason than that Mr. Patterson plans to publish at least four books this year. One victim has given Nora a diamond whose carats (four) and color ("at least D or E") become part of the story. And when she kills him, she leaves him "lying on the floor of one of the bathrooms in his 11,000-square-foot Colonial."

Mr. Patterson drops the names of a favorite ice cream, various hotels ("They had stayed at the Biltmore, one of her favorites, but only if they put you in the main building") and various haunts around Westchester. And he notes the "regal burl walnut casket" in which one rich victim is buried, while also noticing the "slackers and moochers" loafing around Starbucks. But the brand name of most interest here is that of Howard Roughan, the book's other author. He appears to be one of Mr. Patterson's better collaborators.

At least the big-ticket elements of "Honeymoon" spring from the writers' imagination. They haven't cashed in on anybody else's pretensions in the way celebrity biographers do. But "Front Row," Jerry Oppenheimer's tell-not-much about Vogue's top editor, Anna Wintour, seeks out the snobbery to be found Ms. Wintour's past. "She was patrician," says one "friend" (the kind who would talk to Mr. Oppenheimer). "She was not a playful child." And: "Anna hated badly dressed people."

In some ways Mr. Oppenheimer's efforts are exemplary. Aspiring mudslingers can marvel at the sheer creativity of the following sentence: "Anna didn't do drugs, even though marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and everything else one could snort, inhale, or shoot to get recreationally high was all around her, everywhere she went." Also impressive is his ability to string out the obvious, since this book's focal point is snobbishly self-evident from the start. "A mixture of fashion, wealth and elitism" is both Ms. Wintour's hallmark and Mr. Oppenheimer's main selling asset.

As "Front Row" does its best to out-snoot its subject, someone remembers Ms. Wintour visiting an estate, complete with chauffeurs, butlers, helium balloons and breakfast on silver trays. "It sounds all very 'Gosford Park,"' the speaker sniffs, "but 'Gosford Park' was about an industrialist, and Patrick was an aristocrat. It's very different."

That should give Mr. Fellowes -- who wrote "Gosford Park" as well as "Snobs"--every reason to turn up his own nose. It violates "that most tedious of all English aristocratic affectations," as "Snobs" describes it: "the need to create the illusion that you are completely unaware of your privileges."

CROWD PLEASERS Correction: February 22, 2005, Tuesday The Crowd Pleasers column in The Arts yesterday, about the selling power of snobbism in books, misspelled the surname of the author of "French Women Don't Get Fat." She is Mireille Guiliano, not Giuliano.